Visibility Through Foliage - A Plenoptic Sensor for Riverine Operations

The threat of attack from within obscuring foliage is a very real threat to U.S. riverine craft or other marine operations close to shore. Generally, this asymmetric situation allows opposing forces to hide undetected within or behind bushes and trees until an opportune moment for attack. On the other hand, shipboard personnel are relatively exposed and well-lit by sunlight, and have difficulty obtaining any visibility of impending attack. Technology that is able to provide visibility into the foliage at water’s edge can provide warning of suspicious activity, allowing the marine craft to assume a defensive posture or take pre-emptive action. Nanohmics proposes to build an electro-optical imaging device (called the ThruView™) capable of producing imagery within dense stands of brush, bushes, and trees. The innovative imaging system is based on hardware which records the four-dimensional light-field from objects in the field of view, providing real-time back-end processing to form images of objects that may be mostly obscured by intervening foliage. The optical system is analogous to synthetic-aperture radar or holography, and can operate in the visible, SWIR, and/or MWIR portions of the spectrum.